An open letter to Lollapalooza's Perry Farrell

August 12, 2007

BY JIM DeROGATIS POP
MUSIC CRITIC

Last weekend, Lollapalooza
took over Grant Park for the
third time since its reinvention
as a destination festival by
Austin, Texas, promoters C3
Presents. After a news
conference on Day One, I
questioned concert founder,
co-owner and spokesman Perry
Farrell about complaints from
the local music community;
later, he responded onstage with
his band, claiming: "The
Sun-Times doesn't want
[Lollapalooza] back! They don't
think we have good manners!"

Dear Perry:

The Sun-Times certainly
does want Lollapalooza to
return. But it wants the
world-class festival this city
warrants, and one that
celebrates its status as the
live music capital of America,
especially since your five-year,
$5 million contract with the
city means this will be the
major music event here every
summer through 2011.

With the original
Lollapalooza tours from 1991 to
1996, you created a new model
for the industry and delivered
some of the most extraordinary
concerts that hundreds of
thousands of fans had ever seen.
Your ideal was to champion
diverse, innovative sounds
before a vibrant, socially aware
community, and you brought that
vision to life while
simultaneously making
considerable and well-earned
profits.

The new Lollapalooza lacks
any sense of mission beyond
selling tickets. It offers a
hodgepodge of bands performing
on stages named for corporate
sponsors, treating the music as
mere entertainment -- or worse,
just another tool for
advertisers hawking their wares.

Last year, I interviewed 13
Chicago concert promoters,
artist managers and industry
professionals and summarized
their suggestions for improving
the fest. The same problems were
even more noticeable this year,
and once again, many members of
the local music community urged
the following improvements.

1. Limit corporate
sponsorships

Yes, these have become a fact of
life, and that isn't necessarily
bad: Advertisers help lower
ticket prices and pay for
amenities benefitting everyone.
But the most commercially and
artistically successful festival
in America, Coachella, doesn't
sell naming rights to its stages
or allow advertising there. Why
does Lollapalooza?

One of this year's sponsors,
AT&T, raised serious questions
about artistic freedom when its
Webcast censored Pearl Jam's
comments about President Bush.
Artists and advertisers
sometimes have incompatible
goals, and Lollapalooza must
choose sides.

2. Give us quality, not
quantity

The fest offers 130 bands on
three days for a relatively
reasonable $195, but there can
be too much of a good thing:
Several performers were
overwhelmed by louder acts at
neighboring stages; the smaller
stages were plagued by sound
problems, and one of them
completely failed during a
headlining set.

The festival wouldn't suffer
if it cut back to 80 great acts
on four main stages and one
smaller platform. Given the size
of the park, concertgoers might
even enjoy more music if they
had more time to get from field
to field -- or if the free
trolleys served average
concertgoers as well as VIPs.

3. Reconsider the VIP areas

We can debate whether a sense of
community can ever exist amid a
two-tiered system in which most
fans stand under the sun in a
dusty field while others pay
$850 to recline on lounge chairs
and enjoy a wine bar, massage
tent, catered food and
air-conditioned Porta-Potties.
But there's no denying that
prime parcels of cool, shaded
greenery ringing the fields are
cordoned off for a privileged
few at the expense of the many
who might enjoy stretching out
on a blanket in between sets.

4. Join the local community

Lollapalooza still doesn't have
a Chicago office, and it's only
alienating the local scene with
contracts prohibiting its acts
from performing within a 90-mile
radius for 60 days before and 30
days after the fest unless it's
at an officially sanctioned
event. This clause might be
necessary to protect ticket
sales for top headliners, but it
unfairly penalizes smaller
touring bands, local artists and
clubs.

The fest also continues to
ignore Chicago's diversity. Last
year, it failed to publicize
appearances by Common, Kanye
West and Manu Chao in the
African-American or Latino
communities, and this year, Femi
Kuti played a day-closing set to
a sparse crowd of 2,000, even
though he's a hero to Chicago's
35,000 Nigerian-Americans. The
fest is missing an opportunity
to sell reduced-rate tickets to
fans of performers like these
who otherwise feel excluded from
the concert.

5. Make it special again

Coachella scores major reunions
of legendary bands; Pitchfork
offers rising stars and cult
heroes performing classic
albums, and the old Lollapalooza
specialized in surprise
collaborations. If the new
Lollapalooza really wants to be
the biggest and best destination
festival, it needs to create
more once-in-a-lifetime
experiences.

Chicago has plenty of
ordinary rock concerts every day
of the year, Perry. What it
doesn't have yet is the
extraordinary festival it
deserves, and we hope you'll
give it to us.